Dr. Lee McGaan  

Fall 2016 Office Hours:   MWF:  9:30 - 10am, 11am - Noon & 1 -2pm;  TTh:  2-3pm & by apt.  |  copyright (c) by Lee McGaan, 2006-2016

Portfolio Design Plan Assignment
last updated 9/20/2011

The Portfolio Design assignment for Senior Colloquium asks you to write a description, in three distinct, labeled sections, of how you intend to "customize" your portfolio in ways that will make it useful to audiences / viewers other than the COMM faculty who will grade your success in meeting the major objectives.  (This is really yet another instance of doing audience analysis.) 

 [ You may want to sit down and draw or "storyboard" your portfolio site as you would like it to be seen by various "users" before beginning to write the assignment. ]

Section 1.  Audiences.  Begin by identifying who you imagine might view your portfolio site and what they might be looking for. Do you imagine graduate school faculty might view it?  prospective employers (and from what sorts of organizations)?  family and friends? Write one or more paragraphs describing the various potential audiences who may view your site and what impression you want them to have of you, your work and your abilities.  Then identify the kinds of information and materials you will want them to see so that you can create the desired impression. (1-4 paragraphs typically)

Section 2.  Structure.  Describe how you will structure the navigation, links and pages of your portfolio so that each non-faculty viewer will readily be able to find the sort of material you want them to see and be persuaded in the way you wish.  This description might include: (one half to 2 pages)

• a listing of additional kinds of pages you will place on the navigation bar and something of the content they will contain.  You could, for example, create a page for "Professional Skills and Abilities," a sort of "what I can do your your organization" page.  Or maybe you want a "Teaching and Research" page.  Or an "Acting or Design Resume" page.  You might even create different home/starting pages for different kinds of viewers.

• a description of how you will construct the internship (or independent) page to create a positive impression of your skills

•  which artifacts you might want various viewers to see and what kinds of descriptions of those artifacts you might

• how you will use navigation or added pages to guide viewers to the things you want them to see and understand
   

Section 3.  Hyperlinks.  Describe the links you intend to place in your resume (or elsewhere) that help guide viewers to your "best stuff."  These links, likely to be placed in the "professional skills" or the "experience" sections of your resume, will connect the reader to artifacts and descriptions of the skills and abilities the artifacts demonstrate to make it easy for non-COMM viewers to discover how really good you are at various things. You might also include links to the web sites of your past employers.  (a paragraph or so)

I don't imagine that this paper needs to be long; one or two paragraphs for each viewer type discussed in Section 1 and a page or two for Section 2 and Section 3. 

Email your "Portfolio Design Plan" to Professor McGaan on or before Thursday, October 20.